Business Systems Analyst, Senior

Under general direction, the Business Systems Analyst, Senior serves as a senior liaison between judicial and court business stakeholders, Information Technology teams, project managers, vendors, and other partners to ensure technology solutions effectively support the operational and strategic needs of the South Carolina Judicial Branch (SCJB). The position leads complex business analysis activities across enterprise judicial systems and modernization initiatives, including requirements elicitation and management, business process analysis and redesign, solution evaluation, data and integration analysis, system validation, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), implementation support, and post-implementation assessment.

The Senior Business Systems Analyst analyzes current-state processes, develops future-state requirements, identifies opportunities for automation and process improvement, and translates judicial business needs into clear functional, technical, data, integration, security, usability, accessibility, and reporting requirements. The position supports enterprise applications such as case management, e-filing, attorney and bar systems, document management, web applications, reporting and analytics platforms, and other statewide judicial technologies.

The incumbent serves as a senior subject matter expert for assigned business domains and systems and provides advanced analysis and escalation support for complex issues affecting court operations, data integrity, system functionality, or integrations. Working with considerable independence, the Senior Business Systems Analyst leads business analysis workstreams for complex initiatives from discovery through implementation, facilitates collaboration among diverse stakeholders, mentors less-experienced analysts, and promotes consistent business analysis, requirements management, testing, and documentation practices throughout the Judicial Branch.

The position helps ensure that SCJB technology investments deliver measurable business value and solutions that are reliable, secure, usable, maintainable, and aligned with Judicial Branch objectives. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE POSITION This job bulletin represents general duties for this position and is not intended to be construed as exclusive or all-inclusive. Other duties may be required and assigned.

Business Analysis & Requirements Management Leads requirements elicitation and analysis for complex, enterprise, and cross-functional technology initiatives involving judicial, administrative, and operational business processes. Partners with judges, court personnel, business units, technical teams, vendors, and other stakeholders to identify business needs, objectives, problems, constraints, and desired outcomes. Facilitates discovery sessions, interviews, workshops, process reviews, and other requirements-gathering activities.

Analyzes stated requests to identify underlying business needs and ensures proposed requirements address the actual problem or opportunity. Develops and maintains comprehensive business, functional, system, data, integration, reporting, usability, and operational requirements. Creates user stories, use cases, business rules, acceptance criteria, workflow diagrams, process models, requirements specifications, and other appropriate analysis artifacts.

Develops, refines, and maintains user stories, acceptance criteria, business rules, and supporting requirements so backlog items are sufficiently defined and ready for development. Translates complex business requirements into clear and actionable specifications that can be understood by both business and technical stakeholders. Identifies assumptions, dependencies, constraints, risks, gaps, conflicting requirements, and potential impacts during requirements analysis.

Evaluates and prioritizes requirements based on business value, organizational priorities, technical feasibility, risk, and stakeholder needs. Maintains requirements traceability from identified business need through design, development, testing, implementation, and production validation. Manages requirements changes throughout the solution lifecycle and evaluates the impact of proposed changes on scope, schedule, systems, integrations, data, and business processes.

Validates requirements with appropriate stakeholders and obtains necessary concurrence or approval before development or implementation. Ensures business requirements align with Judicial Branch policies, standards, strategic objectives, and enterprise technology direction. Serves as a senior subject matter resource for assigned business domains, applications, and business processes. Business Process Improvement & Solution Analysis Leads analysis of existing business processes, workflows, systems, and procedures to identify inefficiencies, redundancies, manual activities, control gaps, and opportunities for improvement.

Documents and evaluates current-state processes and works with stakeholders to design efficient and sustainable future-state processes. Performs gap analysis to identify differences between current capabilities and desired business outcomes. Identifies opportunities to streamline, standardize, automate, or eliminate unnecessary business processes and activities. Evaluates alternative solutions, including process changes, application configuration, workflow automation, system enhancement, integration, or development of new functionality.

Assesses proposed solutions based on business value, feasibility, cost, complexity, risk, maintainability, usability, and alignment with enterprise standards. Challenges proposed solutions when appropriate and assists stakeholders in distinguishing between a requested solution and the underlying business requirement. Conducts impact analysis to determine how proposed changes may affect business operations, users, applications, integrations, data, reporting, policies, or other downstream processes.

Develops recommendations and options for management consideration when multiple approaches are available. Collaborates with architects, developers, data professionals, security personnel, infrastructure teams, vendors, and other technical resources during solution evaluation and design. Ensures technology solutions support efficient court operations and do not unnecessarily replicate existing enterprise capabilities. Supports business case development by identifying expected benefits, operational improvements, risks, dependencies, and potential measures of success.

Participates in post-implementation reviews to determine whether implemented solutions achieved intended business outcomes and identify opportunities for further improvement. Solution Validation, Testing & Quality Assurance Develops and coordinates consistent testing strategies and quality-assurance practices to ensure implemented solutions satisfy approved business and functional requirements. Creates or reviews test plans, test scenarios, test cases, expected results, and acceptance criteria based on documented requirements.

Leads or coordinates User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with appropriate business stakeholders. Validates that completed functionality meets business requirements prior to production implementation. Performs functional, regression, integration, workflow, data, and other appropriate testing activities. Verifies application behavior across applicable business scenarios, user roles, workflows, and system integrations. Documents defects, unexpected behavior, requirements gaps, and testing results in sufficient detail for technical teams to investigate and resolve.

Works collaboratively with developers, vendors, quality assurance personnel, and business stakeholders to prioritize and resolve defects. Assesses the business impact and severity of identified defects and assists with prioritization. Verifies resolved defects and performs appropriate regression testing before recommending implementation. Supports production-readiness assessments and implementation decisions from a business and functional perspective.

Participates in post-deployment validation to confirm that implemented functionality performs as expected in the production environment. Stakeholder Engagement & Delivery Coordination Serves as a senior liaison and builds effective working relationships between Judicial Branch business stakeholders, Information Technology teams, project managers, vendors, and other internal and external partners. Facilitates meetings, discovery sessions, requirements workshops, design discussions, decision-making sessions, demonstrations, and implementation-readiness activities.

Communicates complex business and technical information clearly to technical and nontechnical audiences to support stakeholder understanding, organizational change, and adoption of new technologies and business processes. Partners with Project Managers to coordinate scope, priorities, schedules, dependencies, risks, issues, decisions, and delivery activities. Identifies stakeholder concerns, conflicting priorities, unresolved decisions, and project risks and works collaboratively to achieve resolution.

Facilitates consensus when stakeholders have competing business requirements or differing perspectives. Provides status updates, recommendations, issue summaries, and other information to project and organizational leadership as appropriate. Helps lead and guide development sprints by ensuring the development team has clear, prioritized, and actionable requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, and business context.

Participates in and, where appropriate, facilitates sprint planning, backlog refinement, sprint reviews, demonstrations, and other Agile/Scrum ceremonies. Ensures development priorities remain aligned with approved business requirements, organizational objectives, and stakeholder expectations. Reviews proposed sprint scope and assists in identifying dependencies, risks, gaps, and sequencing considerations before work is committed.

Reviews completed sprint deliverables against requirements and acceptance criteria and coordinates stakeholder validation and feedback. Coordinates business readiness activities, including UAT participation, communications, training, procedural changes, and implementation preparation. Helps maintain the product backlog by refining requirements, identifying needed enhancements, clarifying priorities, and preparing work for future sprints.

Advanced Application Support & Problem Analysis Provides advanced functional and analytical support for complex issues involving assigned enterprise applications and business processes. Serves as an escalation resource for incidents requiring detailed knowledge of business workflows, system functionality, integrations, data, or configuration. Analyzes reported problems to distinguish application defects from data issues, configuration problems, user-process issues, integration failures, or misunderstood requirements.

Uses SQL, application logs, data analysis, system documentation, user feedback, and other available resources to investigate complex problems and perform root-cause analysis. Assesses the operational and business impact of incidents and assists with prioritization and escalation. Collaborates with developers, Database Administrators, infrastructure teams, vendors, cybersecurity personnel, and other resources to investigate and resolve complex issues.

Documents reproducible steps, expected versus actual behavior, affected users or processes, supporting evidence, and business impact. Validates application fixes and configuration changes before or following implementation as appropriate. Identifies recurring application-support issues that indicate a need for system enhancement, process improvement, training, or additional documentation. Recommends long-term corrective actions rather than relying solely on temporary workarounds.

Maintains sufficient knowledge of assigned enterprise applications to understand how changes may affect related systems, data, users, and court operations. BA Practice Leadership, Documentation & Knowledge Management Promotes consistent business-analysis practices, standards, methodologies, templates, and documentation across Judicial Branch technology initiatives. Mentors and provides guidance to Business Analysts and other team members regarding requirements analysis, process modeling, testing, documentation, and stakeholder engagement.

Reviews business-analysis artifacts prepared by others and provides constructive feedback to improve quality and consistency. Develops and maintains reusable templates for requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, process models, UAT, traceability, and other BA deliverables. Establishes and promotes appropriate standards for documenting business processes, system functionality, decisions, assumptions, business rules, and requirements.

Maintains accurate and current documentation for assigned applications, business processes, integrations, and projects. Develops functional documentation, process diagrams, workflow documentation, user guides, reference materials, FAQs, and knowledge articles as appropriate. Facilitates knowledge transfer among business users, technical teams, support personnel, and other analysts. Participates in lessons-learned activities and applies identified improvements to future initiatives.

Encourages cross-training and knowledge sharing to reduce organizational dependence on individual subject matter experts. Security, Data, Compliance & Non-functional Requirements Identifies, analyzes, and documents non-functional requirements necessary to ensure solutions are secure, reliable, accessible, usable, auditable, maintainable, and capable of meeting Judicial Branch operational needs. Works with Information Security personnel to identify and document authentication, authorization, role-based access, confidentiality, auditing, and other security requirements.

Assists stakeholders in identifying requirements associated with sensitive, confidential, sealed, restricted, juvenile, personally identifiable, or otherwise protected information. Ensures applicable accessibility requirements are identified and incorporated into application and user-interface requirements. Identifies performance, availability, scalability, disaster recovery, business continuity, retention, auditability, and related operational requirements.

Identifies and documents data requirements, including data elements, definitions, business rules, validation rules, source systems, mappings, transformations, and expected data quality. Collaborates with the Data & Analytics team on reporting, analytics, data integration, warehouse, and data-quality requirements. Identifies reporting and analytical requirements during solution discovery rather than treating reporting solely as a post-implementation activity.

Ensures requirements involving APIs, interfaces, system-to-system exchanges, and external partners are sufficiently documented and understood. Works with technical and business stakeholders to identify applicable policies, standards, legal requirements, records requirements, and other compliance considerations. Documents audit-trail and historical-data requirements where system activity or changes must be retained or reconstructed.

Ensures non-functional requirements are incorporated into requirements traceability, solution design, testing, and acceptance activities. Escalates identified security, compliance, data-quality, or operational risks to appropriate technical or organizational leadership. Examples of Duties A Bachelor’s Degree or higher in Computer Science, Business Analytics, or other IT related field and five (5) or more years’ experience; an Associate’s Degree in Computer Science, Business Analytics, or other IT related field and seven (7) or more years’ experience; or a high school diploma and twelve (12) or more years’ experience in a Business Systems Analyst role providing, but not limited to, business analysis, business process improvement, technical/data analysis, facilitation/communication, systems thinking/problem solving, and leadership/influence.

CBAP, PMI-PBA, CCBA, Certified ScrumMaster/Professional Scrum Master, or Product Owner certification. REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, ABILITIES AND OTHER CHARACTERISTICS Advanced knowledge of business analysis principles, requirements management, process improvement, solution analysis, testing, and system implementation practices. Ability to lead requirements elicitation, analysis, prioritization, documentation, validation, and traceability for complex and enterprise-level initiatives.

Ability to develop clear business and functional requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, business rules, workflows, and process models. Strong understanding of Agile/Scrum practices and ability to help guide development sprints, backlog refinement, sprint planning, demonstrations, and related delivery activities. Ability to analyze current-state processes, identify inefficiencies and gaps, and recommend future-state solutions involving automation, workflow improvements, integration, or system enhancements.

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including the ability to conduct gap analysis, impact analysis, root-cause analysis, and dependency analysis. Working knowledge of enterprise applications, relational databases, SQL, system integrations, APIs, data flows, and related technical concepts. Ability to analyze and validate data, reporting requirements, business rules, application functionality, and system integrations.

Strong knowledge of functional testing, regression testing, integration testing, User Acceptance Testing, and defect management. Ability to identify and document non-functional requirements, including security, accessibility, performance, availability, auditability, data, integration, and compliance requirements. Excellent written, verbal, facilitation, presentation, and interpersonal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex business and technical information to both technical and nontechnical audiences.

Ability to build consensus, manage stakeholder expectations, resolve conflicting requirements, and maintain effective working relationships across business and technical teams. Ability to independently lead business analysis workstreams, manage multiple priorities, exercise sound judgment, and provide clear recommendations to leadership. Ability to mentor less-experienced analysts, review business analysis deliverables, and promote consistent standards, documentation practices, and continuous improvement.

Ability to quickly develop a strong understanding of Judicial Branch operations, court processes, applications, data, policies, and enterprise technology needs. Qualifications Demonstrated knowledge of Agile and/or Scrum methodologies, including backlog refinement, sprint planning, and user story development. Experience with requirements elicitation and documentation practices, such as Business Requirements Documents (BRDs), functional specifications, and business workflow modeling.

Experience applying software testing methodologies, including test planning, test case development, and support of User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Familiarity with DevOps or Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools, such as Azure DevOps or comparable platforms. Knowledge of the South Carolina state court system and its operational processes. Experience working with South Carolina’s Statewide Case Management System (CMS), Jury Management System (JMS), and E-Filing applications is preferred.

Training or hands-on experience supporting court case management systems, judicial technology applications, or comparable enterprise-level systems. Demonstrated ability to analyze complex technical and functional issues, perform troubleshooting, and implement effective solutions. Experience developing, modifying, and executing SQL scripts for data queries, validation, reporting, or troubleshooting purposes. Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain technical concepts to non-technical users and stakeholders.

Supplemental Information The South Carolina Judicial Branch offers an exceptional benefits package for FTE positions that include: Health, Dental, Vision, Long Term Disability, and Life Insurance for Employee, Spouse, and Children; State Retirement Plan and Deferred Compensation Programs (Temporary positions have option to enroll); 15 days paid annual (vacation) leave per year; 15 days paid sick leave per year; Option to designate 10 days of earned paid sick leave per year as family sick leave; 13 paid state holidays; Paid Parental Leave; and Workers’ Compensation Benefits.